Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini review

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini is a slimmed down version of Xperia X10, which is now available in India at a price tag of Rs. 16,745 - almost half the price of its older sibling.
 
Let's find out does this device compromise in the specs department compared to Xperia X10 to justify the price difference? The first thing that you will notice with this device is not that hard to guess. It's certainly the small screen size of Xperia X10 Mini.

Smartphones have multimedia capabilities and the ability to view lots of information at once at their core, and for that you need a large screen, right? Well not according to Sony Ericsson whose Android toting Xperia X10 Mini has now landed in India.

Sony Ericsson describes the Xperia X10 Mini as 'compact' and says it is smaller than a credit card, which is true if you take the on-the-table footprint of 83mm x 50mm x 16mm as your guide. The handset is 16mm thick though, so while it won’t fit into your wallet like a credit card does, it will squeeze into all but the smallest of pockets, and at 88g you’ll barely notice it is there.

Now, getting right back to basics, that size means, quite obviously enough, a small screen.

It delivers 240x320 pixels in just 2.55-inches. So, quite obviously, one thing you aren’t going to be doing a lot of with this handset is Web surfing even though Sony Ericsson has worked hard to make this task efficient.

The WebKit Web browser offers a thumbnail of a whole page over which you drag a magnifying window in order to see what you want to zoom into.

Scrolling is efficient too thanks to the capacitive screen, but if you’ve used a large screened smartphone you’ll likely feel that browsing is a very squeezed experience here. Oh, and there's no Flash support.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini is equipped with slide out QWERTY keyboard and integrated Timescape app. But, there's also a bit of an issue with text entry. The screen simply is not big enough to accommodate a mini QWERTY keyboard. Sony Ericsson has again tried to be helpful here with separate slide-out screens offering different characters.

One delivers smileys (scroll up for loads of the critters), @, brackets and other important symbols. Another is a basic 1 to 9 pad, the third your alpha keypad.

Multitap and Quicktext (predictive text) are both on offer and we found the system remarkably quick to get to grips with. We’ll be looking at the X10 Mini pro in due course, and that has the added element of a slide out qwerty keypad, but suffice it to say here that if you are an infrequent texter and mobile email user you might find the Xperia X10 Mini works for you.

We said at the outset that the Xperia X10 Mini runs Android. Sadly it is version 1.6. Why Sony Ericsson can't populate its handsets with the most up to date version of Android we can't understand. We sincerely hope an upgrade is coming very soon.

On top of Android Sony Ericsson has overlayed its own user interface. There are multiple home screens which can carry widgets – only one each, but when you add a new one you get a new screen for it. On the main home screen is something called corner control.

This boils down to customisable icons, one in each corner of the screen, for launching oft-used apps. It's a super idea which works really well. In fact, we'd have liked more shortcuts along some of the straight edges of the screen.

<< Previous 1 2 Next>>